Mark Cetilia: The New Way

The New Way is an interesting project for both the methodology Mark Cetilia adopted to produce it and for how effectively the collective result references particular electronic music styles from the last thirty to forty years. Whether by accident or design, many of the dozen tracks overlap with the output of other artists operating in the fields of techno, noise, house, and industrial, and as the double vinyl set plays, it's possible, for example, to imagine one's hearing tracks by Pan Sonic, Plastikman, Merzbow, and others.

A few words first, however, about the production approach adopted by Cetilia, a sound artist who partners with his cello-playing wife Laura in the electroacoustic outfit Mem1 and has a special interest in exploring the possibilities associated with generative systems. For this project, he exploited the reverberant space within Machines with Magnets, a combination art gallery, performance site, and recording studio in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, by first miking walls and windows within the building and then filling its empty rooms with sound that, feeding back on itself, generated raw material for him to work with. Cetilia boasts impressive academic credentials—he earned his MFA and PhD at Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University, respectively, and currently teaches classes on art, technology, and sound at the latter—but his background as a DJ also came into play on The New Way when he converted the seven-plus hours of material he'd recorded to tracks he could picture using in a DJ set.

Setting the project's tone, “Vaxceril” offsets high-pitched flutter with writhing, dive-bombing noises until a convulsive throb enters two minutes in, the sound growing ever denser as more layers accumulate. “Vaxceril” and the connecting “Metosia” gravitate towards noise as their harsh, Merzbow-like squeals intensify, though Cetilia's material refrains from escalating to a truly cacophonous, ear-shredding pitch. Still, as an opening salvo, it's very much a take-no-prisoners kind of statement. The generative approach, incidentally, was extended to track titles when syllables from a database of prescription drug titles were scrambled to produce the ones used. Though no such items as “Benzaplex” and “Novexafed” exist, they're convincing riffs on the kind of medical product names bombarding us daily. That said, it's hard to believe the connection between “Acidevac” and its acid techno-styled content came about purely by chance.

Carving out cavernous industrial ambient-drone spaces, the warbling “Gesolyte,” “Kantamine,” and gently percolating “Phetrio” could pass for Pan Sonic exercises. Considerably harsher is “Benzaplex,” whose convulsive lacerations likewise could be mistaken for a mid-‘90s production by the Finnish outfit. Meanwhile, the oscillating pitch-shifting in “Capslus” suggests the queasy drone might have appeared on the 1998 Plastikman release Consumed without anyone batting an eye. While a Spanish element emerges in “Cismys” via castanet-styled percussive textures, the focus rapidly shifts when a heavy kick drum pulse and synthesizer-like warbling appear. With a pounding kick drum and looped three-note figure leading the charge, “Acidevac” plays like a Robert Hood production, until, that is, the thumping track morphs into a clangorous, acid-techno raver custom-designed to induce abandon. Elsewhere, “Novexafed” flails about like a seizure-gripped wind-up doll. Some pieces even sound like collaborations or perhaps one artist remixing another.

Working with generative means and digital electronics, Cetilia's created a seventy-two-minute set that pushes into multiple experimental zones, some club-related and others more associative with ambient, drone, and noise genres. The richness of material he generated from a modest number of sound sources is certainly impressive, thought it's hardly the only striking thing about the project.

– Textura (2022)